vaultofthearchonfandomcom-20200214-history
121049-rough-seas-ahead
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- PvP as a whole is a mess really and there ahve been plenty of well constructed, informative suggestions, feedback, and critics of the state for awhile. It also is not even strictly "balance" issues either... Itemization for the longest time has always been "wtf" even to people that don't min/max as example. There have also been numerous suggestions and feedback from various players in regard to other systems/content as well... | |} ---- Oh, and the main reason you should listen to the players.....If you don't the players will leave and the players are an indirect representation of your income.. | |} ---- While this is true, devs aren't infallable either. Sometimes they make grave mistakes that drive players away from their games for life. TERA and LoL have both been games that have done that with their lack of respect for players wishes and their "we're right you're wrong" attitudes. Like the suggestion "Espers should be mobile like every other class" is a valid argument and it needed to happen. | |} ---- ---- i pray no game ever agrees with you, in most succesful games at least some consideration is given to hard core theory crafters. even a class dev only has so much hands on time there a theory crafters out there with litleraly hundreds of hours in a single BG, or dungeon no dev has that, they are busy making the game hardcore theory crafting community is what helps all the noob players in a game, not the class leads if they know enough to guide the players, they know enough to guide the devs | |} ---- Notice how I said the direction of the class, theory crafting is a completely different thing. The problem with a lot of what is going on with the forums atm is you have people that don't theory craft suggesting changes, mainly people that purely PvP. Its pretty rare that a player actually PvPs and PvE, so its hard to take 1 person seriously when their only looking at 1 part of the game. | |} ---- ---- Also, very rarely do theorycrafters want an I-WIN button. They want a fun, interesting class that can compete with others in whatever aspect they choose to play it (heal, tank, dps). | |} ---- totally agree, im far from a theorycrafter, but every game i play, from PoE, to wow, to D3, to WoW to ESO, SWTOR, theory crafters know their ish it would be beyond an insult not to consider their expertise in class design , it would be foolish | |} ---- ---- Exactly this. The problem is, different people want different things. If you give one group what they want, the other group typically gets shafted. Which is why it's best to just find a game you enjoy rather than one you wish you could enjoy and trying to ruin the experience of the people who do enjoy it. Go have fun! That's what it's all about. | |} ---- Probably a good point until you look at what Carbine has done in the past and the direction they are taking in the future. We have been promised x and promised y for a long time now. We have seen good ideas burn themselves out in favor of ideas that simply placate us for a while. I wanted this game to work. I loved this game since I first played a buggy beta. The start of the game, and the words of Carbine Studios sold me on what a developer could be. Since then it seems to have been going downhill. We have devs working on things they ought not to be working on. Fixes that get introduced in one content drop and pushed to another content drop. Bad ideas go into the game, then removed far too long after they are realized to be bad. That's not good business. An MMO is supposed to be an investment. I, like many others here, have invested a lot already into this game. Simply walking away is not an option at this point. | |} ---- Let me explain what I mean by the bottom portion of my OP. Some changes made to classes are a no-brainer. Changes like what we see coming with Warriors in Drop 4. A lot of the upcoming changes are necessary for PvE balance, arguably the main thing that WildStar has going for it right now. Without these changes PvE imbalance would remain, which isn't good for the game. Changes like these, to an extent, don't need to be tested really. Any feedback about these changes will likely be something along the lines of "I don't have everything I used to, complain complain complain". Let me be clear that I don't want changes like this to be disputed, nor should they be asked whether or not they are necessary. Going off that same model of the upcoming Warrior changes, what should happen is testing. Testing in the sense that perhaps maybe a certain ability would be better tuned at x cooldown to better flow with the synergy of another ability. This is the kind of testing that often gets overlooked. Maybe not this exact scenario, but there are plenty like it where a little bit of listening to valuable feedback would go a long way. Now don't get me wrong, I am well aware that in order to get valuable feedback from these forums you may have to sift through miles of garbage. But I ask you, what is more valuable for this game -- dedicating 1 day a week to sift through mud for gold, or ignoring the gold exists and leaving someone else to capitalize on it? I reiterate. Class direction is something better left up to the Class Leads and developers, but fine-tuning that direction and picking the paper the map is printed on can and should be a group effort. | |} ---- ---- +1 to this. Players typically are good for identifying things they like but awful at suggesting good changes. Devs honestly normally never take player suggestions seriously and there's a good reason for that. People who think otherwise are just ignorant. | |} ---- You have defined ignorance. Devs are normally players of games much like the players themselves. There is no special school one attends to learn game balance. Devs, excluding the fact that some of them had a hand in creating things, are no better equipped to assess and propose changes than players. You make it sound as if devs are gods that should be revered and given total trust when this is rarely the complete story. | |} ---- It's not that devs are gods, it's that they approach design from a perspective that players are largely ignorant of. Players do not understand design goals and they generally cannot distinguish between good and bad design. The only thing players are really good for is describing their experiences. It's difficult to explain unless you've done any design work yourself. | |} ---- Wait, what? The very definition of a developer means they ARE better equipped and have access to data and information that allows them to very precisely make better decisions for the health of the game than players. Player input is important from a "fun" perspective, and Carbine has always been very transparent. But players don't have the information to experience to make calls about balance when they can't see the bigger picture. | |} ---- "Does x work as intended" hardly requires the ability to see the big picture. Again, I'm am not insinuating that players should have even a hand at determining the future of anything, but being able to test what he have been given is a different story. A perfect example of this is the tank threat issue from Drop 3. It was caught by players on the PTR. Many suggestions were offered to alleviate this game-breaking issue. It didn't take years of game designing experience, extensive knowledge of coding, or knowing the bigger picture to figure out that threat generation on tanks during Drop 3 PTR was not working as intended as a result of the DPS changes seen from the AP balance. Nothing was done about it during PTR. It took an additional 11 days before a bandaid was put on. Not a permanent fix, a bandaid. These are the kinds of issues I'm talking about. | |} ---- Um.... were you on the Nexus report? If not, then he looked into a camera, not directly at you. You're taking their modification of their proposals awfully personal. If you are truly that upset with the product, then calmly explain the problem, unsub and come back when you think it's gotten better. Other people have already done this. I see at least three returning players posting on the front page right now, with no telling how many silently resubscribe But to claim they "looked you in the eye and are spoon feeding you lies" is really melodramatic. It does a lot more to undercut your suggestions rather than promote them. | |} ---- ---- Okay, so then he was talking to no one, you're right. That was used more metaphorically than literally, glad you caught that though, thanks. I may unsub, even so, I would have 6 months left of playing time. so that really wouldn't alleviate any problems. Just as you cannot tell how many silently sub, you cannot tell how many silently un-sub. For the 3 that have made their presence known, I have recently lost 3 guildmates to games such as WoW, LoL, and Smite. | |} ---- It's cool. Just wanted to point out how you were sounding. It's an easy trap to fall into. Hell, I've done it myself in other game forums. And I don't disagree with you. Devs should listen to their players. But you always have to be impartial and professional in the way you say things. Avoid hyperbole, exaggeration and drama and, sooner or later, the devs will catch on. | |} ---- I really don't think the content and the message are that impacted by writing style and tone. Some of the brightest people are sarcastic and witty. Hyperbole is a tool used to stress emphasis, drama is a tool to express an impassioned opinion. Just try and remember here that Donatelli makes very little posts. He's supposed to be the guy in charge. I'm sure his message was heavily filtered to make sure it didn't say anything wrong. IF a post like that comes from the guy in charge at the beginning of the year, then yes, you should take it for what it is, as it represents all of Carbine's stance in Wildstar as a whole. | |} ---- I understand where you're coming from on this, but that's my style of writing. It's how I normally express myself in written form (and often verbally). It's how the American school system taught me to do so. If I was simply conveying facts and data, my OP could have been summed up in about 4 lines. | |} ---- I'm really starting to appreciate your recent posts. This is exactly right. If all the devs ask is, "What's wrong?" the answer will almost always be, "We have to do things!" Start listening to what the masses want and you end up developing a digital Pez dispenser... get your candy at the click of a button! The point is, they can listen all they want about the current state of the game, but any player suggestion has to be taken with a grain of salt. | |} ---- However, the balance is most games suffers because the devs don't listen to players who have metrics to back them up. I've yet to see a game that has excellent to perfect balance. I have yet to see a game that has good to excellent balance. I have seen many a class get butchered because devs did not listen. Hardcore gamers treat gaming like a second job and many excel at more than one class. To say that they can't see the bigger picture and are only relevant when it comes to the game being fun is being short sighted. | |} ---- Again, just because they have that access and have that info doesn't mean they have the greenlight to just make changes. If you knew the sheer amount of work it took between "Hey, how about X change?" to "X change is live" you'd probably set your own eyelids on fire out of frustration. | |} ---- Thank you for the insight into the "behind the scenes" life as a Developer for NCSoft. What doesn't make sense to me is how during beta Carbine prided themselves on listening to and using the feedback they were given. As we are now further and further away from the release date of WildStar it seems that their "motto" so to speak is all but being reversed. Why able to react and work with us then, but now it's a different story? | |} ---- Didn't they say in the stream, pretty directly, that though the launch is coming they're still working in itemization based on the feedback from the PTR forums? | |} ---- Yes but look at it this way. They designed a better system with poor values. They used some of the feedback and made minor changes (the biggest of which was -14 tech +14 insight on a piece of Engineer GA gear). They are going to release this better system with poor values regardless of what anyone says. Once it is released, they are already intending to fix this system that has not yet been implemented. Why can't the values be changed now to better reflect the feedback they are receiving? Planning on fixing something that has yet to break is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. | |} ---- You don't actually know more than the Devs. Your feedback is appreciated like all of ours, but to suggest Carbine balance PvP by what you think, would be a terrible, terrible idea. You could always make your own game and see how successful that is if you're not happy with Wildstar | |} ---- Well, that's actually pretty easy. In Alpha/Closed Beta/Open Beta, you have far fewer players than you ever will at Launch. Hell, until Open Beta hits you directly control how many people are playing your game and providing feedback. Launch opens the floodgates and now everyone and their brothers are giving feedback, and instead of focused groups doing focused play, everyone is everywhere and calling out the myriad issues that every MMO will have at Launch and far beyond. It's unlikely the devs aren't listening. It's far more likely that less people are being listened to on the virtue of there being TONS more people giving feedback. As I said earlier, that system may have already been fixed internally, but not vetted for this build. If Drop 4 is within the next 2-3 weeks, the "final" internal build was cut weeks ago. The only things that will get fixed at this point are showstoppers (crashes, economy-destroyers, performance-destroyers, quest/zone blockers, major graphical glitches, map-outs ((which are falling through the map and dying)), and other massively-gameplay-disrupting bugs). Is that ideal? No. Will the definition of 'showstopper' vary from dev to dev, and player to player? Wildly. All we can have is patience. This kind of stuff isn't 100% in the hands of the people making the content; its distribution falls to the Production team and the Publisher's demands on deadlines. Drop 4 is going to land when NC/Carbine Production demands it land, whether it's filled with all the things the dev teams feel necessary or not, AND whether all of its bug fixes are in or not. I promise you that at least two of the hotfixed issues that come in each hotfix after Drop 4 have been fixed for weeks and didn't get vetted for the due date. | |} ---- This is deeply saddening. How come feedback cannot be obtained earlier? Is that a person problem? Like, "I am trying to re-work itemization here, what does each class NEED?" Gather that data for a bit, talk to class leads, develop a real plan. It seems this particular issue was attack with no forethought and no direction. | |} ---- I wish I could give you an answer that had more truth than just "here's my experience working in a similar studio." My best guess is that feedback is taken as it's given (within reason, no troll posts or spam asking for some ludicrous change) and that's where the process begins. When I worked on my content, feedback wasn't always the starting point for a change. Did it help? Yes. Often times feedback from players was the sole reason a change was approved for development (that being said, NEVER STOP GIVING CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK, AND ALWAYS POST SCREENSHOTS/LOGS! FOR THE LOVE OF DEVS EVERYWHERE, DON'T STOP AND ALWAYS GIVE PROOF). Unfortunately that's where things get complicated, because going from "The players don't like this, how about we do Change X?" to actually submitting Change X to a test build is a long-winded process governed by production, and at any point the team working on Change X could be told "You need Change X done by Date Y or it's going to be pushed back to Date Z." Sometimes Change X is pushed LIVE, but Change X has Bugs A B & C. The team might get told that Bugs A & C will be hotfixed, but Bug B won't. And a lot of the time, Bug B is the worst of the 3 and the Live Ops team is terrified of what tinkering with Bug B could do to the Live Environment. On that same strain, sometimes the team for Change X has Features D, E, & F and even though they worked their butts off, Features D & E just didn't meet Production's approval and only Feature F makes it in. This almost always involves Features D & E being the ones players wanted the most. Then, with luck and grace, those features might be approved for a patch or hotfix. I speak only from my personal experiences at my previous job (which I'm hesitant to cite here) under an NC-published studio, but that was the nature of the beast where I worked. It's heartbreaking. It sucks from both a dev standpoint and a player standpoint, IMO. | |} ---- ---- Devs have metrics, I have first hand experience with multiple classes. Yes, there are a lot of things that I may not know. To say that the developers know everything that I know would be a tremendous overestimate. This is why I stated it as clearly as I did. I think that the developers have a tremendous amount to learn from the players, especially the players that are as experienced as I am, and have been as successful as I have been in PvP. Please, consider a little more about the message being said, rather than your personal vendetta against me. | |} ---- This. Devs generally only see the dev side of the game, while we only see the player side. Both sides accumulate specialized knowlegde of the game they're surrounded by. Then, ideally, the two sides compare information and work on a reasonable middle ground. Remember, Evade, Carbine's motto is "The devs are listening." not "you don't know wtf your saying so player feedback doesn't matter." | |} ---- I wouldn't ever say in a million years that developers ONLY see the dev side of the game. By the virtue of metrics, forums, videos and analytics they can see every aspect of the game that a player would see EXCEPT for the player's personal experiences during gameplay. However, players do generally only ever see the player side. Nowhere is THAT more apparent than the forums, where players think they know how the game works and operates just because they play it and pay the studio money. The devs are listening, but they're also human and can't immediately flip a switch to make changes. It takes time. Your first-hand experience with multiple classes doesn't mean diddly, sorry to say. Just because you can play the crap out of a class doesn't mean you have what it takes to call the shots. On top of that, man, can I just call you on this: "To say that the developers know everything that I know would be a tremendous overestimate." No. That is a load. You absolutely positively 100% do not know this game better than the hard-working people who made it. If every game studio took your advice and tried to build their game with "player knowledge" we'd see a lot more terrible AAA games on the market. You can make suggestions and offer your insight into what you feel would be best. However, Eclips, you are not a developer, you do not work for Carbine. Saying you know better than the developers is... well, to be perfectly honest it's a jerk thing to say. You're a paying customer, not an employee. You're an end-user, not a programmer. | |} ---- ---- That's not the majority of what they'd be doing anyway. Chances are they have stress- and/or auto-testing that will put Engineers in a DPS-check map with other classes to see if a certain attack rotation does more/less damage than another class's standard rotation. | |} ---- ---- ...huh? When did this become part of the conversation? Nowhere did I say I expect them to change by the flip of a switch, tomorrow, next week, or even next month. Check out my posts and you're only echoing what I've been saying all along. | |} ---- ---- ---- ....... wow. Okay, first of all, this entire post is exactly why you are 100% unfit to make any game-changing decisions in any game ever. If I have to explain to you why that is what it is, then you're beyond understanding it. Second, why not put your money where your mouth is? Here, let me help you: http://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH05/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=NCSOFT&cws=1&rid=1918 That's a link to an opening Carbine has for a Game Designer. If you really truly know more than any dev on Carbine's team about PvP, then put up or shut up. Apply for the job and get your changes into the game. I'm not being facetious either; one of the PvP leads I worked with was a former arena champion. If you really are that good, you should apply. Third, if you're so good at this, I want you to detail out what you'd do to the Warrior class alone in terms of improving PVP while maintaining PVE balance. When you're done I'll make a test pass for your changes and we'll see just how much work it'd take and if the balance changes would be feasible. Then we can discuss whether or not these changes would adversely affect economy, game balance, and inter-class play. Then we can submit it to Carbine and see just how well received it is. If 'second' and 'third' sounds like insults, they're not. You can sit here on the forums and say you're the high-and-mighty king of game knowledge (so much so that you're better than the professionals hired to work on the game), or you can prove it. | |} ---- I don't think I could ever work for Carbine Studios. I think that our personalities would clash, because I'm not much of a nerf gun shooter while my game is in the dumps. I also don't post Vines, can appear on a livestream without looking hungover, or find it a good idea to join a company that has poor workplace reviews, pays poorly for the area, and has the performance numbers to reflect it. Sorry, I don't mean to back out of your application, but I think we both know that there's quite a few people at Carbine that are actively looking for a better job. So let me put this in perspective for you. I put a lot of effort into the warrior posts. I've put a lot of effort into systematically breaking down and explaining a large number of the flaws in PvP. I've made posts similar to the ones you're asking for over on the PvP forums. But here's the thing dude. These guys, "the professionals," are paid to do that job. They're paid to spend 40 hours a week doing it. I don't have that time because I have my own career and personal life to deal with. To be fair I'm not even asking them to a great job becoming of a master class game designer, I'm just asking them to not do things that are widely regarded as shit. Let me ask you something. Moja posted warrior changes and basically said, "Merkal did it, have fun." All 6 of the remaining high ranked warriors came in and unanimously agreed that they were bad changes for pvp, and to at least revert them / don't make them so harsh until proper feedback can be acquired. I spent hours and hours writing up and comparing those changes to live, had them weighed in on by my peers, had them derailed and insulted by trolls, and I even owned up to my bad ideas. The important part about it was that PvE warriors, PvP warriors, etc, as a community, united to state that they don't like the changes, they felt like it was going against the feel and direction of the class. The pve warriors eventually conceded because they new they needed changes, and they were still able to do the deeps. The PvP warriors are still here scratching our heads at the way merkal just trashed them. All in all, I don't think requesting things to come out well developed, without requiring more months of change and consideration isn't too much to ask of a professional game studio. PvP is in the worst state it has been since the game's release. I could be the best game developer in the world, or the worst. I could actually already be a game developer for a successful company. Don't try and tell me to come do it better when the professionals are delivering. All you have to do is look at the past and see the pattern for the future, unless something fundamentally changes. I don't really think I'm the one responsible to fix some of the issues, but I can weigh in on their actions and the results that they're producing. I don't have to work for Carbine to determine whether or not the shit smells like shit or not. | |} ---- ---- I never said I was the best person for the job. I just said that it would be nice for the warrior developer to listen to the feedback of warriors before making large sweeping changes, that's all! I mean, we do know it the most intimately! Either way, you can talk about the industry, and the studio, and how hard it is to sit in an office all day with air conditioning and a food truck outside, but all I see are poor results. Until I, and the millions of people not subscribing to the game see a product that doesn't meet expectations become the product that was promised, we can't help but wonder what they're doing, especially when the changes coming are in the wrong direction. It's really not personal, as the work ethic of Carbine doesn't bother me either way. The results matter to me, just like they matter to other consumers. | |} ---- You know I actually agree with you and think there's a chance you might know better than the warrior devs regarding these topics, but what I don't understand is why you seem to legitimately believe that a gaming company would change their plans for an alternative plan brought up in their forums by random players. Like... That's just not going to happen. You seem intelligent enough to understand this so I don't get why you seem so frustrated/angry with everything. | |} ---- ---- Not really. In PVP, you have to maintain a certain rating to even pay to play the runeslot fruit machine. For the best weapon, that was 1800. And this was during a time when the gear gap was much more vast. That meant if you started RPVP to get your prestige and you lost too often, not only would you not have your prestige, you couldn't even try to buy the weapon anymore. Most of the time, you needed that weapon to be perfect because someone else had that weapon and they'd knock you straight out of the running for the gear you needed to even try to hang. That's my understanding anyway. It could be understood to be frustrating if that happened, and worse it encouraged PVPers to play as little as possible, just enough to get the prestige they needed to try to get their weapon and then to stop to save themselves from falling through. In a perfect world, John Q Peeveepee would just pick himself up and hope to raise his rating enough to try again. But it's not like something like GA, where when you fail to win or fail to get something, the same GA will be there next week to try and win. PVP fluctuates, and you may earn yourself into a bracket so unforgiving it feels like a wall. Certainly before the gear gap reduction, this happened more often than not. | |} ---- In PVE* (Vic gave the PVP version) It was more like, people spent hours and weeks getting gear only to find that the slots weren't optimized (since they were random) and the piece was essentially useless. It isn't fair to players to have them spend that much time and effort hoping against hope that their piece of gear will drop from a boss that takes a huge amount of effort to down, only to troll them with bad slots that make the piece effectively worthless. That's prettymuch fixed with the fluxes, though it is expensive. | |} ---- Never mind the lack of guarantee on the number of slots. 2 slot epics anyone? | |} ---- Edit:This is in terms of PVP The issue was RNG slots came before the ability to re-roll and the expansion of quality runes for the various elements. So to get even a decent set required a good amount of farming, farming that you must do in another bracket or another format or else you could lose your 1800. This is compounded by the fact that you may be competing against people that have perfect sets because they got it one patch sooner than you. That just added to the frustration of class imbalance and a generally low PVP population, it was the proverbial straw. | |} ---- Ugh... if there's one thing I hate about modern MMO's it's the excessive amount of min/maxing that goes on. I'll never understand why devs HAVE to put in rune slots or enchantment slots or whatever on pieces of gear to make them 'useful'. The gear itself should be useful enough! The rune slots should only provide bonuses, not be essentials. And of course, the raiding guilds are part of this problem too. Why take along a Warrior with a piece of gear when you can take another Warrior with an identical piece of gear but with a whole +10 more grit! That's like, a whole 0.25 seconds of tanking he could do! Yeah, I know grit is a poor stat, but that example type of mindset is way too common in the game. It's the moment when a game becomes a math problem that I just start shaking my head I personally think Carbine should scrap the entire rune system and replace it with cosmetic enhancements. We already play in a fantasy/sci-fi hybrid universe. Why not have a set of runes that, instead of providing buffs to invisible stats, can create a visual effect to turn your sword into a mystic shattered levitating crystal blade with flaming chainsaw teeth? That would at least ensure that everyone with the same gear started on equal footing and help to keep people from rage quitting because they got an Insight slot instead of a Brutality one. It might also help please the same people who love housing and crafting, at it gives them even more things to customize for their characters | |} ----